#Film Review: The Cloverfield Paradox (2018)

I watched this film as soon as it was released on Netflix but it took me a week to write something up due to various reasons including the mother of all colds. But here it is now.

This is a third film in the trilogy and the last part was surprisingly released on Netflix, without prior announcements or marketing. Thus, it created a buzz but it somewhat failed to deliver the expectations.

In a nutshell, a crew at the international space shuttle faces technical issues, which eventually results with Earth’s disappearance. As they are fixing technical issues new issues arise with one member of the crew appearing injured and even though she knows everyone nobody really knows her. As it turns out, when the Earth finally appeared it was an Earth from the different reality than the one the crew came from and they already exist on this alternate Earth in a different form and living different lives. This comes as particularly stressful for Ava Hamilton (Gugu Mbatha Raw) whose children died in her dimension and who is considering to go to the Earth to save them. At the same time, paradox opened new dimensions on Earth from which our crew came from and thus mythical creatures and monsters are back to the Earth too. These monsters look similar to the creature that destroyed Manhattan in the first Cloverfield film, just that appears to be bigger. Weird stuff also happens in the new dimension, which kills majority of crewmembers except for Ava and Schmidt (Daniel Brühl), who manage to return homes to their own dimension; however, they do not know to which dimension they are returning to and what is waiting there…

I didn’t mind watching the film but it felt as it was between Netflix’s Star Trek (which I regularly watch and I blogged about it before, see here) and Event Horizon so I felt a bit weird about it.

I also felt weird in the way former stories have been inserted into this film and it seems as if this film over explained what happened before. In addition, I would have prefer to see more events on Ava’s Earth and how monsters are destroying the Earth. However, I did like the acting, which I thought was very convincing. This particularly applies to Gugu’s portrayal of Ava and her emotional reactions when she learns that her children are alive in an alternate dimension, however, other actors were very good too.